Well - I have a purpose for this little corner of the internet now. I have decided this is my dumping grounds. I have a toolbar link to dump as I go. It will come as I find it - no particular rhyme or reason - as I bounce around this wonderland of information we call the internet. Hope you find something of interest - you may just get an idea of just who I am by what I find valuable. Enjoy.

Friday, September 30, 2011

KMO welcomes John Michael Greer back to the C-Realm to discuss maladaptive memes like the ones that drive speculative bubbles and predictions of the impending end of the world. Economists believe that abstractions, like money, can be manipulated in ways that can overcome the material limitations of the "real" world. John Michael says that to call this "magical thinking" is to do a serious disservice to operative mages and other practitioners of magical techniques. He suggests that we label the belief that we can derive something from nothing "economic thinking." Music by the Transpersonals.

Friday, September 23, 2011

With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion

Steve Weinberg

___

"For we already live in the openness experiment, and have for two hundred years. It is called the Enlightenment -- with "light" both a core word and a key concept in our turn away from 4,000 years of feudalism. All of the great enlightenment arenas -- markets, science and democracy -- flourish in direct proportion to how much their players (consumers, scientists and voters) know, in order to make good decisions. To whatever extent these arenas get clogged by secrecy, they fail."

David Brin

___

"Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness, we don’t really know what love is."

Marianne Williamson

___

Statue of Liberty Inscription - The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"
cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I mention this whole subject here,
however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real
in the terms that you imagine it to be. When you are born, then, you
are already "conditioned" to perceive reality in a
particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but
intense range.

I must explain this before I can
clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems
of reality in which I operate. There is no space between my
environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that
separate us. In a very real way, of speaking, your concept of reality
as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or
arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts -
and the facts are difficult to explain.

........

The universe that you seem to perceive,
either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of
galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you.
Basically, however, this is an illusion. Your senses and your very
existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe
in such a way. The universe as you know it is your interpretation of
events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. The
events are mental.

.........

Root assumptions are those built-in
ideas of reality of which I spoke those agreements upon which you
base your ideas of existence. Space and time, for example, are root
assumptions. Each system of reality has its own set
of such agreements.

........

The entity, or the soul, has a far more
creative and complicated nature than even your religions have ever
granted it.

It utilizes numberless methods of perception, and
it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness. Your idea of
the soul is indeed limited by your three-dimensional concepts. The
soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses
consciousness as you use the eyes in your head. Now in my level of
existence I am simply aware of the fact, strange as it may seem, that
I am not my consciousness. My consciousness is an attribute to be
used by me. This applies to each of the readers of this book, even
though the knowledge may be hidden. Soul or entity, then, is more
than consciousness.

........

...for I send only a portion of myself
here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you
write a letter to a friend...

........

Now some of you who read this book will
immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have
already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly
distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses. Remember also that if
physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion
caused by a greater reality. The illusion itself has a purpose and a
meaning.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The self that you know is but one
fragment of your entire identity. These fragment selves are not
strung together, however, like beads of a string. They are more like
the various skins of an onion, or segments of an orange, all
connected through the one vitality and growing out into various
realities while springing from the same source.

I am not
comparing personality to an orange or an onion, but I want to
emphasize that as these things grow from within outward, so does each
fragment of the entire self. You observe the outside aspect of
objects. Your physical senses permit you to perceive the exterior
forms to which you then react, but your physical senses to some
extent force you to perceive reality in this manner, and the inside
vitality within matter and form is not so apparent.

I can
tell you, for example, that there is consciousness even within a
nail, but few of my readers will take me seriously enough to stop in
midsentence, and say good morning or good afternoon to the nearest
nail they can find, stuck in a piece of wood.

Nevertheless,
the atoms and molecules within the nail do possess their own kind of
consciousness. The atoms and molecules that make up the pages of this
book are also, within their own level, aware. Nothing exists -
neither rock, mineral, plant, animal, or air - that is not filled
with consciousness of its own kind. So you stand amid a constant
vital commotion, a gestalt of aware energy, and you are yourselves
physically composed of conscious cells that carry within themselves
the realization of their own identity, that cooperate willingly to
form the corporeal structure that is your physical body.

I am
saying, of course, that there is no such thing as dead matter. There
is no object that was not formed by consciousness, and each
consciousness, regardless of its degree, rejoices in sensation and
creativity. You cannot understand what you are unless you understand
such matters.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Your own physical environment appears as it does to you because of your own psychological structure. If you gained your sense of personal continuity through associative processes primarily, rather than as a result of the familiarity of self moving through time, then you would experience physical reality in an entirely different fashion. Objects from past and present could be perceived at once, their presence justified through associative connections.

Say that your father throughout his lifetime has eight favorite chairs. If your perceptive mechanisms were primarily set up as a result of intuitive association rather than time sequence, then you would perceive all of these chairs at one time; or seeing one, you would be aware of the others. So environment is not a separate thing in itself, but the result of perceptive patterns, and these are determined by psychological structure.

Nice to know our representatives want to hear what we say and take us seriously ... oh wait - they make us pay to speak - arrest us when we say how we feel and laugh at us as we are removed... Paul Ryan is an asshole.